It was a mistake that was forward of its time.
Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group have been making an attempt to dial in a brand new electrical arc furnace for a steelmaker once they observed one thing odd. The carbon electrodes, slightly than breaking down, have been rising bigger.
The group had inadvertently created what’s generally known as a pyrolysis response, which is mainly burning one thing within the absence of oxygen. On this case, the furnace was splitting methane into pure hydrogen and pure carbon. The group reported their discovery internally after which, mainly, forgot about it.
“Again then, no one cared as a result of no one cared about methane pyrolysis, about hydrogen,” Massimiliano Pieri, CEO of Tulum Vitality, instructed TechCrunch. The experiment was largely forgotten for the following 20 years.
However a few years in the past, traders for the Techint Group’s company VC arm, TechEnergy Ventures, have been scouring the panorama for brand spanking new methods to supply hydrogen from methane with out the standard air pollution.
Techint’s traders didn’t should look far. “Somebody within the firm realized, ‘However we have already got that. We’ve this discovery,’” Pieri stated.
So the conglomerate dusted off the concept and spun out Tulum to show the unintended discovery right into a viable enterprise. Just lately, Tulum closed an oversubscribed $27 million seed spherical led by TDK Ventures and CDP Enterprise Capital, the corporate completely instructed TechCrunch. Doral Vitality-Tech Ventures, MITO Tech Ventures, and TechEnergy Ventures participated.
Tulum isn’t the one startup pursuing methane pyrolysis as a strategy to produce hydrogen. Fashionable Hydrogen, Molten Industries, and Monolith are amongst Tulum’s rivals. The response has attracted consideration for its capacity to supply hydrogen from low cost, broadly obtainable pure fuel with none carbon dioxide emissions. In pyrolysis, methane is damaged down within the absence of oxygen, the one merchandise are hydrogen fuel and a mud of stable carbon, each of which might be bought.
However Tulum differs in a couple of methods. For one, it doesn’t want to make use of costly catalysts to encourage the pyrolysis response, which a few of its rivals require. In its use of the electrical arc furnace, Tulum can also be utilizing a broadly used — if modified — expertise.
“This provides you a giant head begin,” Pieri stated.
Tulum will use the seed funding to construct a pilot plant in Mexico alongside an current Techint Group metal plant. If all goes properly, the metal plant might purchase hydrogen and carbon straight from Tulum to be used in its operations.
Pieri stated that at full-scale manufacturing, a business plant would generate two tons of hydrogen and 600 tons of carbon per day.
Tulum is hoping its business scale plant will produce one kilogram of hydrogen for about $1.50 within the U.S., the place electrical energy and pure fuel are each low cost. At that worth, it’s simply 50 cents extra than most hydrogen comprised of pure fuel immediately, and it considerably undercuts a few of the main inexperienced hydrogen strategies. That’s earlier than the corporate sells any carbon that its course of generates.
Not unhealthy for an nearly forgotten mistake.
